In Self Defense

by Susan R. Sloan

  “What do we know about it?” Erin inquired.

  The officer shrugged. “Not much. It’s a 1986 black Ford Ranger, and it was bought about two weeks before the incident off a used car lot in Tacoma, from an owner who prides himself on not asking too many questions. He said the guy paid cash and gave him a name, address, and driver’s license that all turned out to be phony.”

  “Any kind of description?”

  The officer glanced at his notes. “He was tall, dark haired, and scruffy is all the dealer could remember.”

  “Any prints?” Erin asked, knowing it would be too good to be true.

  “A lot of smudges, but nothing usable,” the officer confirmed.

  “Great,” Erin muttered. She would add the report to the case file. The stalker was alive and well, and she still very much wanted to get him. But there was a bit of irony in the realization that his latest target might well have turned out to be a killer in her own right.

  ***

  “About six months ago, Richard told me that Clare was having an affair,” Jeffrey Durant, Richard’s brother from Bellingham confided. “I told him I didn’t believe it, not for an instant, but he assured me he had the proof.”

  “He had proof that his wife was cheating on him?” Dusty asked.

  “Yes,” Jeffrey confirmed. “He said he’d hired a private detective to follow her, and the guy had gotten pictures.”

  “Did he ever show you those pictures?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask to see them,” Jeffrey said. “Richard claimed he didn’t care so much about the affair, but he was afraid Clare might get it into her head to divorce him, and he was worried about his position at Nicolaidis. Hell, he had a right to be worried. Gus may have started the company, but it was Richard who brought it into its own. I think he was afraid that, after she dumped him, she would have had the Board of Directors dump him, too. She could do that, you know. She has control.”

  “Your brother didn’t happen to tell you this private detective’s name, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Jeffrey said. “And again, I didn’t ask. Look, I like Clare. I’ve always liked her. I think she’s a real nice woman, and a great mother. I didn’t want to believe what Richard was saying. But he told me she had changed a lot lately, that she was unpredictable. I never saw that side of her, but Richard claimed, ever since the arsenic episode, she had begun to have these wild emotional swings, and she’d fly off the handle for no reason at all. I know it sounds silly, but I think he was a little afraid of her.”

  ***

  “I’m not sure I should be discussing any of this with you,” Elaine Haskell, Richard’s sister from Ravenna, said. “I don’t think either Richard or Clare would appreciate me airing their dirty linen in public.”

  “Did they have dirty linen to air?” Erin inquired.

  “Everyone has some,” Elaine replied, looking directly at the detective.

  “Did you know your sister-in-law was seeing someone on the side?” Dusty asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” Elaine said. “And I doubt that she was. But if she had been, I wouldn’t blame her. My brother was never terribly conscientious about keeping his wedding vows. Between you and me, I don’t know how Clare put up with it. I certainly wouldn’t have.”

  “Did you know your brother had hired a private investigator?”

  “To do what -- follow Clare?” Elaine asked with a giggle. “Now that would have been a boring job. If she isn’t at Thornburgh House, or out working for one of those endless charities of hers, she’s at home with the children. Richard didn’t need a private investigator to tell him that. Doreen could have told him. So could I, for that matter. Clare and I speak on the telephone just about every day.”

  “You and your sister-in-law are close?”

  “We’re family,” Elaine declared. “If you must know, I like her better than I liked my brother. He could be a real ass, sometimes.”

  “Did your sister-in-law ever discuss the question of divorce with you?”

  Elaine thought about that for a moment. “Not exactly,” she replied. “But I remember an odd conversation we had during the summer, it was a few weeks after her accident on the mountain. Clare said something about how terrible it would be for Richard if he ever lost his position at Nicolaidis, because it meant so much to him.”

  “Did she say why he might lose it?”

  “Well, I asked her what she meant by that, and if Richard was actually in danger of losing his job, but all she said was something about how people change, sometimes so much so that they weren’t the people you thought you knew anymore, and you wondered if they ever really were who you thought they were. And then I asked her if she was thinking about leaving Richard, and she said she wouldn’t have to do that, it was Richard who was going to do the leaving. Pretty spooky, when you think about it now, isn’t it?”

  “Do you think your brother would have left?”

  “Never,” Elaine said flatly. “He may have wanted other women, but take my word for it, he wouldn’t have given up being the CEO of Nicolaidis for any of them.”

  ***

  Edwin Zipp worked out of a small dump of an office on Denny Way, with a discreet sign on the door. He was a burly man with bushy eyebrows and an ugly scar down his left cheek that he passed off as a war wound. In his time, he had been a Marine, a police academy dropout, and a private security guard. Now he scrounged around the edges of society with a notebook and a camera.

  “How’d you find me?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t hard,” Erin told him. They had simply started at the top and then worked their way almost all the way to the bottom.

  “Well, I can’t tell you anything, you know. My work is strictly confidential.”

  “Your client is dead, Mr. Zipp,” Dusty reminded him.

  “Yeah, well, even so,” the private investigator said with a shrug, “I still don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Durant told his brother you had some pictures that would prove his wife was having an affair. Is that correct?”

  “What if it is?”

  “If you have them,” Dusty declared, “produce them, or we might tell his wife, and then you might just find yourself caught in the middle of a nasty little lawsuit.”

  Zipp sighed. “Okay, so I spent a few days and took a few pictures. The guy was hungry, I needed the money, and he didn’t care what it cost. He said his wife wanted to divorce him, and he needed some ammunition to fight back.”

  “Where are the pictures?”

  Zipp heaved himself up out of his chair and walked over to a rusty metal file cabinet that sat against one wall, rummaging through one of the drawers until he found what he was looking for.

  “This is all I got,” he said, handing Dusty a thin folder.

  Inside were several photographs of Clare Durant, wearing an evening gown, and smiling up at a young man who was not her husband.

  “Richard Durant thought his wife was having an affair with the guy in these pictures?” Dusty asked.

  “I don’t know what he thought,” Zipp replied with a shrug. “But that’s what I got.”

  Erin leaned over to have a look. “Isn’t that the assistant?” she asked. “We met him at Durant’s office. What was his name . . . Lilly, wasn’t it?”

  “James Lilly,” Dusty said. “And the way I understand it, he took Clare Durant to charitable events whenever her husband was unavailable. I think it was part of his job description.”

  “Every time her husband had a more pressing engagement, I’ll bet,” Erin murmured.

  “What?” Zipp said. “She wasn’t having an affair with the guy?”

  “Not likely,” Erin told him.

  “Let’s just say, if she was having an affair with him, her husband wouldn’t have had to hire you to find out about it,” Dusty added.

  “Not much of a detective,” Erin said on their way out. “But then, you get what you pay for.”

  “Just for the hell of it, why not let’s go
have a little talk with James Lilly?” Dusty suggested. “After all, he was Durant’s assistant, and he has sort of a relationship with his wife. Maybe he can shed a little light on all this.”

  ***

  “I try very hard to stay out of people’s personal lives,” James Lilly said when Dusty and Erin found him cleaning out his desk at the Nicolaidis Building. “Did I know that Mr. Durant was engaged in . . . extracurricular activities? Sure, I did. He didn’t exactly make a big secret of it. He was always asking me to make dinner reservations for him and send flowers and stuff. But other than accompanying Mrs. Durant to a charitable event now and again, I don’t know that I could tell you anything about her personal life.”

  “You accompanied her to quite a few charitable events,” Dusty pressed. “Did you ever notice her paying special attention to anyone else?”

  “No,” James said. “Certainly not the way I think you mean. Why are you asking all these questions anyway? I thought Mr. Durant’s death had been ruled an accident.”

  “We’re taking another look,” Erin told him.

  The pale eyes widened ever so slightly behind the glasses. “Well, as I said, I couldn’t tell you very much about Mrs. Durant’s personal life,” he reiterated. “But if you wanted to know about Mr. Durant’s personal life, seeing as he’s dead and all, and couldn’t care, I could maybe be more helpful.”

  “Stephanie Burdick,” Erin said without preamble.

  James rolled his eyes at that. “She lasted a lot longer than any of the others,” he said. “Usually, it was a couple of months, and then he’d get bored and move on. But Ms. Burdick was still around, even after a couple of years.”

  “Was it serious?”

  “Well, I don’t know what you mean by serious, but she was certainly keeping him interested.”

  “Do you know if he ever considered a divorce?”

  James looked uncomfortable at that, and Erin leaned in. “If you know something, Mr. Lilly, please tell us. It could be very important.”

  “At the beginning of last year, he asked me to find him an attorney,” James said reluctantly.

  “What sort of attorney?”

  “A divorce attorney. He said he had already talked to one, but he was looking for a second opinion.”

  “Did you find him one?” Dusty asked.

  “Sure. There are lots of divorce attorneys around.”

  “And was the second opinion more to his liking?”

  “I don’t know. He never said.”

  “Did Mrs. Durant know that her husband was talking to divorce attorneys?” Erin inquired.

  “I think it would be safe to say that she did,” James said with a chuckle.

  “Why?”

  “Because you always know what’s on Mrs. Durant’s mind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  James looked from one detective to the other, afraid he had made a mistake. “Look, I don’t want to talk out of turn here,” he said. “These people have been very good to me, and I owe them a lot.”

  “This is important, Mr. Lilly,” Dusty told him. “Or we wouldn’t be asking.”

  “Well, obviously, Mrs. Durant wasn’t happy about it,” James said. “In particular, she wasn’t happy about Ms. Burdick. I overhead part of a conversation in Mr. Durant’s office. She was reaming him up and down about how his string of tarts didn’t bother her, but someone like Stephanie Burdick was a whole other story, and he wouldn’t like what would happen if he didn’t end it right away.”

  “Was she any more specific than that?”

  James was now clearly uncomfortable with the nature of the conversation. “She said there were ways of taking care of things that didn’t have anything to do with divorce attorneys,” he told the detectives reluctantly.

  ***

  “Do you think she set the whole thing up, right from the beginning?” Mark Sundstrom asked the two detectives seated across the desk from him. “The stalker? You?”

  “No,” Erin replied. “The stalker is real, we know that. We’ve got him on tape. We know his history. We believe she simply saw an opportunity, and took advantage of it.”

  “If you must know, we think the stalker may have set it up,” Dusty said. “But of course, we have no idea how, and we have no way of proving it.”

  “Clever guy, is he?”

  “Our profiler says he’s smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is,” Erin told him. “I think she may be wrong.”

  Sundstrom sighed. “It’s not the strongest case I’ve ever taken into court, but I guess I’ve tried weaker ones,” he said. “Let’s see what a grand jury thinks.”

  ***

  Eight weeks after the death of Richard Durant, the grand jury handed down an indictment, having found sufficient cause to charge Clare Durant with the murder of her husband. Rather than having Dusty and Erin go to Laurelhurst and take her away in handcuffs, she was allowed to surrender herself, which she did, at ten-thirty on a Thursday morning, with her attorney at her side.

  “Don’t say a word unless I tell you to,” David instructed her. “I’ll do all the talking.”

  Clare was more than happy to leave everything to him. It was actually nice, for a change -- a relief, really -- to let someone else do the thinking and the talking for her. She went through the booking process of being fingerprinted and photographed, feeling deeply humiliated, but without comment.

  Tipped off no doubt by the police, the media were everywhere. Reporters shouted at her, microphones were thrust into her face, cameras assaulted her from every angle. She was quickly whisked away to a private location while an arraignment was scheduled. But then the cameras followed her into the courtroom, where she got to say “not guilty” in a surprisingly clear voice.

  A trial date was set, and by two o’clock that afternoon, she was on her way back home, after posting a million dollar bond, as the defendant in what was doubtless going to be the one of the most explosive cases in Seattle’s history.

  ***

  Clare was in the library, ensconced in front of a warm fire. The television set was on, but she was paying scant attention. It was just past four o’clock, the weather outside was raw and rainy, and she was waiting for Doreen to bring tea.

  Thursday was usually Doreen’s day off, as was this Sunday as well, but ever since Richard’s death, the housekeeper had refused to leave.

  “There’ll be plenty of days I can take off when I want to,” she said every time Clare brought up the subject. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d just as soon stay right here. If I find I need some time to myself, I can just go in my room and close the door.”

  It hadn’t done any good to argue, and Clare had to admit she didn’t really try very hard. Because it was nice to have the company, it was nice to share the burden. And, too, it was nice to have someone screening her calls. She had stopped answering the telephone.

  “I don’t know if it’s going to be the stalker, or a reporter,” she said to Doreen, “and I don’t want to talk to either of them.”

  Clare curled her feet up under her, and with her elbow on the arm of her chair, rested her chin in the cup of her hand and gazed into the flickering blaze. Her blonde hair gleamed in the firelight, and the flames reflected in her dark eyes.

  She had of course been hoping that the process would be simple and straightforward, hoping that the police would accept Richard’s death for what it was, without anyone having to delve into all the messy details. But it certainly didn’t look now as though that was what was going to happen. It was her own fault, she knew. For not doing what she should have done, right from the beginning -- whether anyone believed her or not.

  As if to punctuate her thoughts, the regular programming on the television, whatever it had been, was suddenly interrupted for breaking news.

  “In a surprising turn of events,” the afternoon anchor declared, “the death of Nicolaidis Industries CEO Richard Durant, initially ruled an accident, is now being called a homicide, and his widow, Nicolaidis h
eiress Clare Durant, has been charged with the crime. Refusing to go into details, authorities will say only that sufficient evidence has been developed to convince them that Mrs. Durant may have intentionally shot and killed her husband.”

  Clare picked up the remote and flipped through the other local channels. They were all saying more or less the same thing. She snapped off the television and heaved a sigh of resignation. It was not going to be easy, not for her, not for the children, not for Richard’s family. She would have to be strong, for all of them. But at least she wouldn’t have to stand alone.

  David was on her side now. She had told him everything . . . well, enough, anyway, so that he could make the right decisions. It was fitting that he should represent her. He would think of it as repayment for what her father had done for him and his family, she knew, and he would leave no stone unturned in her behalf. In turn, she would think of it as the best move she could possibly have made. Because, after all, she had done the unthinkable -- she had killed her husband.

  Nine

  The King County Courthouse occupied an entire square block of downtown Seattle, fronting, as it did, on Third Avenue, between Jefferson and James.

  The twelve-story Corinthian style monolith, with its classic portico, its brick and granite exterior, its traditional high ceilings and marble interior was considered the last word in architectural design when it first opened its doors in 1930. The fact that the building was still standing proud was probably some proof of that.

  It had undergone a number of renovations over time, meant to modernize, to upgrade basic comfort, and to insure the safety of its occupants, but after eighty-five years, age and weather and seismic anomalies were beginning to take their toll.

  The courtroom on the fourth floor, where The Honorable Naomi Lazarus would preside over the case of the People v. Clare Durant, was the beneficiary of the most recent remodel.

  It was spacious and done mostly in browns and beiges. The ornate bench, the solid bar, the sixteen jurors’ armchairs, and the ten rows of straight-backed, uncomfortable spectator seats were made of oak. The walls were a textured off-white. The floor was linoleum.